RAM and Q3A

KiLLerCloWn · Post by **KiLLerCloWn** » Thu Jul 18, 2002 4:40 pm

Hi all

I've had this several times now. My motherboard Epox 8KTA3 seems to eat my ram but only Q3A seems to notice. Now I know that Q3A uses all your system resources, that's also why it's such a widely used testgame.

What happens is that every 6 months or so Quake3 will start freezing or exiting to BSOD. And every time I think corrupted vid drivers bla bla bla and go through the whole thing only to find that if I put a new stick or RAM in there it works fine again.

Funny thing is tho, that these same ram that cease to work the perform just fine in my PIII 800. Also all other games and applications like the ram eating Photoshop and Illustrator work fine in my Athlon Tbird 1.33. Only Quake seems to stall.

Now I'm getting a bit sick of buying 512 MBRAM every 6 months just to play Quake3. Is there any way I can limit Q3A RAM usage?

Is there any way I can stop my board eating the ram? I mean I don't overclock, I have a fan point at the ram...not sure what to do here...

System:

1.33Ghz Athlon TBird
Epox KTA8+
512 MB Quality SD 133 RAM...Infineon, Kingston, they all get eaten no matter what brand
CL GeForce DDR
Game Theatre XP
Pioneer DVD
Panasonic S110 Monitor

...tons of stuff

Thanks for any input

KC

KiLLerCloWn · Post by **KiLLerCloWn** » Thu Jul 18, 2002 6:36 pm

Hmm....undeclocking the CPU doesn't help, changing slots doesn't and lockups with looping sound occur randomly, sometimes after 2 mins, sometimes after 30 mins. And I just raced for 2 hours straight with GP4 and it ran as smooth as a babies bottom

Weird...

KC

dadx2mj · Post by **dadx2mj** » Thu Jul 18, 2002 6:46 pm

Have you tried uninstalling and reinstalling Q3A?

KiLLerCloWn · Post by **KiLLerCloWn** » Thu Jul 18, 2002 10:40 pm

Yeah sure, several times

After ages of fiddling and about 10 differen NVIDIA and Creative drivers I found that the retail drivers of the card seem to make it work, I just played 2 hours no prob. Very strange, all other drivers don't and trying with my PIII's GF2MX didn't work either. But the 2 year old retail drivers work, even with the old RAM!!! How is that possible???

So I just installed the latest Creative drivers and then replaced the NVIDIA openGL.dll (or whatever it;s called) with the 2 year old retail one in the windows system folder...and whaddya know...it works! Incredible!

I have no idea what's going on here, but I know I need the latest Creative drivers to play Grand Prix 4 and I know I need the oldest openGL driver to play Quake, and throwing them together actually works. Lmao!!!

Ah well...

KC

Post by **FlyingPenguin** » Fri Jul 19, 2002 9:02 am

There's no way a game can "wear out" your ram.

Are you overclocking? An overclocked system may seem perfectly stable when running desktop apps and most games, but then you throw something like Q3A at it and you'll have stability issues.

First thing I'd do is clock everything normal and see if it's stable that way.

KiLLerCloWn · Post by **KiLLerCloWn** » Fri Jul 19, 2002 11:15 am

It's not wearing them out, it's just that I only note with Quake when they are worn out.

No, I don't overclock anything, and I undrclocked to see if it changes anything, but it doesn't...it's really strange...

KC